The Setons Part 24

"Me?" cried Buff. "Not likely! I'm going to fight, and kill _hundreds of people_."

"Oh, my, my," said Mrs. Taylor. "That's not a nice way for a Christian little boy to speak. That's like a wee savage!"

Buff pulled his sister's sleeve.

"Was Cyrano a savage?" he whispered.

Elizabeth shook her head.

"Well," said Buff, looking defiantly at Mrs. Taylor, "Cyrano fought a hundred men one after another and _he_ wasn't a savage."

Mrs. Taylor shook her head sadly. "Yer Papa would be sorry to think ye read about sich people."

"Haw!" cried Buff, "it was Father read it to me himself--didn't he Lizbeth?--and he laughed--he _laughed_ about him fighting the hundred men."

They had come to the end of the street where the Taylors lived, and they all stopped for a minute, Buff flushed and triumphant, Mrs. Taylor making the bugles of her Sabbath bonnet shake with disapproval, and Mr.

Taylor still brimful of humour.

"It's as well we're leavin' this bloodthirsty young man, Mrs. Taylor,"

he said. "It's as well we're near home. He might feel he wanted to kill us." (Buff's expression was certainly anything but benign.)

Elizabeth shook hands with her friends, and said:

"It would be so nice if you would spend an evening with us. Not this week--perhaps Tuesday of next week?"

The Taylors accepted with effusion. There was nothing they enjoyed so much as spending an evening, and this Elizabeth knew.

"That'll be something to look forward to," Mr. Taylor said; and his wife added, "Ay, if we're here and able, but ye niver can tell."

As they walked on Elizabeth looked at her companion's face and laughed.

"Mr. Taylor is a queer little man," she said. "He used to worry me dreadfully. I simply couldn't stand his jokes--and then I found out that he wasn't the little fool I had been thinking him, and I was ashamed. He is rather a splendid person."

Mr. Townshend and Buff both looked at her.

"Yes; Father told me. It seems that years ago he had a brother who was a grief to him, and who did something pretty bad, and went off to America, leaving a wife and three children. Mr. Taylor wasn't a bit well-off, but he set himself to the task of paying off the debts his brother had left, and helping to keep the family. For years he denied himself everything but the barest necessities--no pipe, no morning paper, no car-pennies--and he told no one what he was doing. And his wife helped him in every way, and never said it was hard on her. The worst is over now, and he told Father. But I think it must have been in those hard days that he learned the joking habit, to keep himself going, you know, and so I don't find them so silly as I did, but brave, and rather pathetic somehow."

Arthur Townshend nodded. "'To know all,'" he quoted. "It seems a pity that there aren't always interpreters at hand."

"And what do you think of the Scots Kirk?" Elizabeth asked him presently.

"In the Church of England a man who could preach like your father would be a bishop."

"I dare say. We have no bishops in our Church, but we have a fairly high standard of preaching. Do you mean that you think Father is rather thrown away in that church, preaching to the few?"

"It sounds impertinent--but I think I did mean that."

"Yes. Oh! I don't wonder. I looked round this morning and wondered how it would strike you. A small congregation of dull-looking, shabby people! But as Father looks at them they aren't dull or shabby. They are the souls given him to shepherd into the Fold. He has a charge to keep. He simply wouldn't understand you if you talked to him of a larger sphere, more repaying work, and so on. People often say to me, 'Your father is thrown away in that district.' They don't see...."

"You must think me a blundering sort of idiot----" Arthur began.

"Oh no! I confess I have a leaning towards your point of view. I know how splendid Father is, and I rather want everyone else to know it too.

I want recognition for him. But he doesn't for himself. 'Fame i' the sun' never vexes his thoughts. I expect, if you have set your face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, these things seem very small. And I am quite sure Father could never be a really popular minister. At times he fails lamentably. Yes; he simply can't be vulgar, poor dear, not even at a social meeting. He sees in marriage no subject for jesting. Even twins leave him cold. Where another man would scintillate with brilliant jokes on the subject Father merely says, 'Dear me!' Sometimes I feel rather sorry for the people--the happy bridegroom and the proud father, I mean. They are standing expecting to be, so to speak, dug in the ribs--and they aren't. I could do it quite well--it is no trouble to me to be all things to all men--but Father can't."

Arthur Townshend laughed. "No, I can't see your father being jocose. I was thinking when I listened to him what a tremendous thing for people to have a padre like that. His very face is an inspiration. His eyes seem to see things beyond. He makes me think of--who was it in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ who had 'a wonderful innocent smile'?"

Elizabeth nodded.

"I know. Isn't it wonderful, after sixty odd years in this world? There is something so oddly joyous about him. And it isn't that sort of provoking fixed brightness that some Christian people have--people who have read Robert Louis and don't mean to falter in their task of happiness. When you ask them how they are, they say _'Splendid'_; and when you remark, conversationally, that the weather is ghastly beyond words, they pretend to find pleasure in it, until, like Pet Marjorie, you feel your birse rise at them. Father knows just how bad the world is, the cruelty, the toil, the treason; he knows how bitter sorrow is, and what it means to lay hopes in the grave, but he looks beyond and sees something so ineffably lovely--such an exceeding and eternal weight of glory--that he can go on with his day's work joyfully."

"Yes," said Arthur, "the other world seems extraordinarily real to him."

"Oh! Real! Heaven is much the realest place there is to Father. I do believe that when he is toiling away in the Gorbals he never sees the squalor for thinking of the streets of gold."

Elizabeth's grey eyes grew soft for a moment with unshed tears, but she blinked them away and laughed.

"The nicest thing about my father is that he is full of contradictions.

So gentle and with such an uncompromising creed! The Way is the Way to Father, narrow and hard and comfortless. And he is so good, so purely good, and yet never righteous over much. There is a sort of ingrained humility and lovableness in him that attracts the sinners as well as the saints. He never thinks that because he is virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale. And then, though with him he carries gentle peace, he is by no means a pacific sort of person. He loves to fight; and he hates to be in the majority. Minorities have been right, he says, since the days of Noah. When he speaks in the Presbytery it is always on the unpopular side. D'you remember what a fuss they made about Chinese labour in South Africa? Father made a speech defending it! Someone said to me that he must have an interest in the Mines! Dear heart! He doesn't even know what his income is. The lilies of the field are wily financiers compared to him."

Half an hour later, at four o'clock to be precise, the Setons and their guest sat down to dinner.

"I often wonder," said Mr. Seton, as he meditatively carved slices of cold meat, "why on Sabbath we have dinner at four o'clock and tea at seven. Wouldn't it be just as easy to have tea at four and dinner at seven?"

"'Sir,'" said Elizabeth, "in the words of Dr. Johnson, 'you may wonder!' All my life this has been the order of meals on the Sabbath Day, and who am I that I should change them? Besides, it's a change and makes the Sabbath a little different. Mr. Townshend, I hope you don't mind us galumphing through the meal? Father and I have to be back at the church at five o'clock."

"You don't mean," protested Arthur Townshend, "that you are going back to church again?"

"Alas! yes--Have some toast, won't you?--Father has his Bible cla.s.s, and I teach a cla.s.s in the Sabbath school. Buff, pa.s.s Mr. Townshend the b.u.t.ter."

"Thank you. But, tell me, do you walk all the way again?"

"Every step," said Elizabeth firmly. "We could get an electric car, but we prefer to trudge it."

"But why?"

"Oh! just to make it more difficult."

Elizabeth smiled benignly on the puzzled guest. "You see," she explained, "Father is on the Sabbath Observance Committee, and it wouldn't look well if his daughter ruffled it on Sabbath-breaking cars.

Isn't that so, Father?"

Mr. Seton shook his head at his daughter, but did not trouble to reply; and Elizabeth went on:

"It's more difficult than you would think to be a minister's family.

The main point is that you must never do anything that will hurt your father's 'usefulness,' and it is astonis.h.i.+ng how many things tend to do that--dressing too well, going to the play, laughing when a sober face would be more suitable, making flippant remarks--their name is legion.

Besides, try as one may, it is impossible always to avoid being a stumbling-block. There are little ones so p.r.o.ne to stumble that they would take a toss over anything."

"That will do, Elizabeth," said Mr. Seton.

"Sorry, Father." She turned in explanation to Mr. Townshend. "When Father thinks I am flippant and silly he says 'Elizabeth!' and his eyes twinkle; but when I become irreverent--I am apt to be often--he says 'That will do,' and I stop. So now you will understand. To change the subject--perhaps the most terrible experience I have had, as yet, in my ministerial career was being invited to a christening party and having to sit down in a small kitchen to a supper of tripe and kola. Alan says the outside edge was reached with him when a man who picked his ears with a pencil asked him if he were saved."